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The Facts and Myths Regarding Growth Management By
Terrell K. Arline, Legal Director Introduction I have been asked to talk about the facts and myths of growth management in Florida. Thats a tall order, but I'll try. I want to first explain why we need a growth management system in the first place, to do that I want to remind you how we used to manage growth, which I think was a lot smarter than it is now. I will then discuss how our growth management system may be improved to better deal with some of the problems of our current growth rate. Let me begin by telling you where I came from, so you can understand my bias and hopefully then decide if I'm full of beans or not. As the grandson of a cultural anthropologist from Harvard, I can say with some conviction that Urban Sprawl, the way growth occurs in our society today, anyway is Killing our Culture. People are fed up with sprawl and over-development, because it is adversely affecting their quality of life and that of their kids. As a lawyer, I know that if the market doesn't do something about urban sprawl, the government will, which will probably be too little and too late. I'm talking about urban sprawl. Let me tell you about my experience with it in south Florida. Before the developers started to direct growth out of the coastal cities into open lands bordering the Everglades and build new subdivisions of walled in single family detached homes on large lots, there was nothing wrong with the coastal cities. I grew up in one. Lake Park was in fact one of the first planned communities in Florida. It was built in the early 1920s by Harry Kelsey, and planned by John Nolan, who was one of Frederick Law Olmstead's students. Lake Park is located on the Atlantic Ridge, which is a dry, sandy strip of land running up the eastern coast of Palm Beach County that separates the estuaries from the Everglades. Lake Park was planned with grid pattern streets, sidewalks, commercial areas, schools, a post office, a bank and other public places, and lots of parks. It had the full complement of public services, police, fire, central water and sewer. Kelsey even built a glass factory and a dairy to provide local jobs. All of this happened before a single house was built. Unfortunately for the developer, the two punch whammy of a killer hurricane in 1928 and the depression knocked Lake Park out until the 1950's. Then it began to grow again to accept the flood of engineers coming to start the Pratt & Whitney R&D plant in northern Palm Beach County. My dad was one
of those engineers. My parents moved there in 1956 and built a 1,300 square
foot house on one of Kelsey's lots. My mom still lives in that house. Lake
Park was a town of some 7,000 people, who met each other at numerous public
places. We walked to school, to shop and to play. By the way, Nocatee is 10 times as large as my home town. When the market pushed people west, there were a lot of these planned communities strung like little jewels along the east coast, just off U.S. 1. We had good schools, lots of community places, sidewalks, good public services and a high quality of life. There was even room to redevelop and a lot of open land directly adjacent to the cities for the market to plan and develop. However, this treasure was left behind as the more affluent people in the older towns and virtually all of the new residents settled in these walled in single family developments west of the Atlantic Ridge in the wetlands of south Florida. This place, which I will call Sprawlville caused significant social, economic and environmental damage. The market moved where the land was the cheapest. It was cheap, because it was under water half the time. In order to build, the developers had to drain the land. The state allowed this to happen in two ways. First, it built canals to funnel the drainage of the wetlands to the coastal estuaries. Second, the state set up a permitting system that accommodated this type of development. While the state tried to "regulate" and "mitigate" the impacts of development, the result of sprawl in south Florida was the waste of millions of acres of wetlands and the loss of millions of billions gallons of fresh water that were dumped to tide. Birds left. Wildlife diversity fell. The destruction of the estuaries by siltation, fresh water, and urban runoff caused estuarine and oceanic fish stocks to fall. This piled more economic woes onto the coastal communities, whose economy was, in part, based on commercial and recreational fishing. Within 20 years,
1,000 square foot, $80,000 homes on 1/8 acre lots in walkable communities,
near commercial and public places were substituted for 2,400 square foot,
$180,000 homes on ½ acre lots in walled-in, residential fortresses.
New malls, Publix, and Eckerd stores sprouted up on every corner in Sprawlville
to serve the new arrivals. This drew business away from the cities. Today, people are crying out for social experience. If they are lucky to live in a city, Orlando, Tampa, Miami, West Palm, Jacksonville, or get to an urban area at least during the work day, or perhaps to the mall, they might have some contact with people. However, in the afternoon people commute home to Sprawlville where there is no place to congregate. The design of these new communities induced these cultural impacts, and it more attention to design that can improve our growth management system. The loss of the grid pattern streets, which I must attribute to the planners and the transportation engineers not the developers, meant a loss in connectivity within the residential area and between the residential area and the places people wanted to go. This means, unless they can get mom to drive them, our kids have to stay indoors playing video games, watching TV and eating junk food. This is not only bad for our culture, it is bad for our kids' health and has created a new phenomenon called "cul-de-sac kids," which our health care system will have to deal with in 50 years or so. Then there are the places the developers turned their backs on. In the coastal communities, the social fabric began to unravel. The older schools were ignored as the school boards struggled with building new facilities in Sprawlville. While we had good water and sewer services in the coastal communities, these were often tapped to serve the sprawling areas. This raised the rates in the existing coastal communities as the capital cost of extending the lines was averaged among all rate payers. As people left the urban areas and businesses failed, land values fell. Then the tax base fell, which compounded the problems. Drugs and prostitution came in. The once planned vibrant places succumbed to urban sprawl's externalities. I tell you I saw these things with my own eyes. They were all avoidable. I went to Washington, D.C. last year. Florida is in a museum. The National Building Museum has an exhibit on Smart Growth. On the face of the wall leading into the exhibit is a huge, 10x10 foot picture of a sprawling subdivision in western Palm Beach County. It is a sea of single family homes with barrel tile roofs, docked around cul-de-sacs in a lake that was once wetlands. There are no parks, no public places. It is a homogenous blob eating up the land. While its sprawl, it certainly isn't urban. This vision of Florida, this Sprawlville does not look inviting and we need to do something about it. To begin, we should first understand the causes of sprawl. The Causes of Sprawl. There are both
avoidable and unavoidable causes of Urban Sprawl. Let me review a few that
are unavoidable. It took 40,000 years for homo sapiens to reach a population
of 6 billion and yet it will take just 50 years to increase again by almost
1/2. We also know that Florida is growing. It took 120 years from statehood
for Florida to reach a population of 5 million. The next 5 million took about
20 years. It took about 15 years to get to 15, 000,000. It will be 20 years
to jump another 5 million. While this tells you the rate of growth is slowing
a bit, nonetheless, population growth in Florida is exponential. This both
compounds the problems of sprawl and accelerates the need to do something
about it. So while we are growing, this growth is less dense than ever before in history. Remember. Downtown London is only a square mile. Still, the recent Sierra Club report "Dark Side of the American Dream", listed 5 Florida cities as among the nation's most sprawling. In many cities the rate of land consumption has oustripped the rate of population growth. In some areas, the population growth rate is actually negative, while the land consumption rate is growing. What does this mean? People are wasting land. This means they also waste water, natural resources, and tax dollars. It also means they spend a lot of time in traffic. Who is to blame for sprawl? Who is to blame for sprawl? Certainly government helped with its regulatory and taxing policies. The old Euclidean Zoning Code was in place in the coastal communities when sprawl began. There the zoning map was rather specific. A residential area here. A gas station there. A school over there. The Zoning Map was in fact often better at determining land use and guiding a coherent land use pattern than the current planning programs of today, which change with the whim of the market. However, Sprawlville was designated "open land" or "agriculture" on the old zoning codes, which made it easy to change to residential. Then there were the ‘planned use developments", or PUDs, which all the planners loved. These were new regulatory tools in the 1960 and 70s, when sprawl began. They allowed the zoning code to be amended a "floating zone", or PUD, to accommodate large single use, residential developments. Consequently, there is a PUD behind virtually every sprawling development in Florida. Why? PUDs gave government a way to avoid the "plan" that was the zoning map. PUDs also gave us the cul-de-sacs and huge commercial centers. I mention this because I believe the idea of a "floating zone" for smart growth just might work to reverse sprawl, as PUDs did to create it. Much of Sprawlville developed before the advent of such things as urban service areas (USA) or comprehensive planning. Rezonings were granted and no one reviewed them at the state or regional level. Still when planning came along, sprawl was accommodated by the state. Remember. It wasn't until 1994, that we even had an urban sprawl rule. By that time, much of the development in south Florida, and around Orlando and Tampa was already there, or at least it had been approved in the platted subdivisions or DRIs of the time. DCA contributed to the problem of sprawl. It did so, in part, by ignoring the rural counties when it was approving the original plans in the early 1990s. These were the places that were essentially undeveloped. At that time DCA made the unfortunate decision to let these counties off easy. The problem is now these areas, St. Johns, Pasco, Seminole, Alachua, and Marion counties and other local governments that are growing Sprawlvilles of their own. Yet because of DCA, their comprehensive plans are totally inadequate to deal with sprawl. This the public in those areas to a significant disadvantage in relation to the local governments that were pushed to adopt better plans. Some how we need to revisit many of the rural plans and make them better at controlling growth. DCA also dropped the ball when it allowed local governments to plan beyond their anticipated need. It approved Urban Service Areas that encompassed 40 or more years of land to sprawl within, which made them essentially useless at containing sprawl. The EAR process didn't help things either. In that we had the chance to fix the plans. However, DCA was given no real power in the EAR process, and unfortunately, the citizens didn't even understand what the EAR was. The result was a lost opportunity to do better planning in Florida. The DRI process is also to blame. I think the DRI process is the antichrist of planning. Admittedly, it began before comprehensive plans were even required and served as the only planning we did for many years. Still most people as early as 1977, felt that comprehensive planning would take the place of DRI review and that hasn't happened. Perhaps this is because a few large law firms make so much money off DRIs. At any rate,
there are DRI's are all over Florida in the most rural lands imaginable. The
DCA has approved more than a million residential units, of which the market
has built less than 15%. What's more, DRIs were approved irregardless of the
local comprehensive plan. When I got to DCA in 1992, most of the DRI planners
hadn't even read the local plan before they approved these massive developments.
The market ran the show. The planners just tried to mitigate the impacts as
best they could. Moreover, very few DRIs ever became the mixed use, well balanced communities they were sold as and the DRI process is so cumbersome, its hard to go in now to retrofit these projects with smart growth design. I believe if the DRI process were repealed, we could put the break on one state program that contributes to urban sprawl. Concurrency was another state idea that certainly helped sprawl. It did this by adding additional inducement for the market to seek out places with good levels of service, i.e., the rural areas and avoid the places with tight levels of service, like the more urbanized areas. It also set up a planning system to funnel money to build new roads into undeveloped areas for the well-connected landowner or developer. Local governments must take the lion's share of the blame. There would be no sprawl unless the local governments first decided to make someone rich by changing his or her land use from agriculture to a higher use. Even if there was a plan on the books, local governments often ignored them. Remember, until 1985, the plan was essentially meaningless and rezonings were a "legislative act." Annexation also played a major part as cities annexed rural lands away from the counties to increase their tax base, and then changed the land use to a higher use to accommodate the market's desires to sprawl. If the DRI process is the antichrist, annexation is certainly one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Finally, I blame the public and the market both equally for allowing sprawl to occur. The market made what it thought it could sell and this had a lot to do with what people thought they wanted to buy. The post WWII FHA underwriting criteria and the automobile industries' marketing and advertizing plans also played a key role in causing urban sprawl. The public didn't know better then. They flocked to Sprawlville in the 1970s, not knowing they were going to be stuck in traffic in 1999. So, what can we do about all of this? The Solutions to Sprawl Just as government,
the market and the public helped create Sprawlville, they can all help make
things better. We can learn from our mistakes and make our growth management
system work better. The public is admittedly schizophrenic about this stuff. I think it is true what the homebuilder's lobbyist says, "There are two things the public is sure about, it hates sprawl and density." At any rate, I believe that if the public is educated from a visual point of view, if citizens are assured that density and mixed use are not going to ruin their neighborhoods, if they are empowered to create their own plans and then given broader standing than they have now in a user friendly forum to compel consistency, they will support our smart growth programs. A 1998 focus group in south Florida defined smart growth as neighborhoods with good schools, privacy, a sense of community, with parks and open space nearby. I think this is also a place much like the planned coastal communities of the 1920s, mixed use panned developments, linked together with green space, with pedestrian oriented rather than automobile oriented transportation networks, that protects natural systems for future generations. Sounds like where I grew up. We need to realize it is not if we grow, it is where, when and how we grow. Moreover, we should fully understand and use both the regulatory and fiscal tools that are at government's disposal to get where we want to be. This is one reason why I am so concerned with devolution of the Growth Management Process. It gives away one of the most potent bargaining chips the state has to get smart growth off the ground. Perhaps we ought to make giving away state oversight, contingent on local governments agreeing to do the right things and then empower the citizens to make them keep their promises. At any rate, here's a list of some things that we can do to have more smart growth in Florida. Full cost accounting. I believe local governments would not approve sprawling developments if they really knew or were required to identify up front just how much it costs to serve them with all needed public services and infrastructure. Thus, we ought to require sprawling developments prepare economic impact statements and then make them pay their own way as a condition of approval. We need to stop subsiding sprawl by averaging the costs among all rate payers. On this point about the costs of sprawl, we should stop kidding ourselves that impact fees are adequate. They have lulled us into a sense of comfort that development is paying its way. In fact, only about 40% of the cost of some services are recovered by impact fees, which means existing taxpayers pay the rest. On the other hand, there is considerable public support for buying land as a way to contain urban sprawl. While I would not advise buying land where the police powers could accomplish the same result, Forever Florida dollars can be used to help contain urban sprawl. Aside from what some people are saying, I believe that the growth management system is essentially sound. Florida's template for planning for growth is not the problem. A law that requires local governments to adopt plans, measured by a minimum criteria rule implemented by a state agency, is absolutely better than an unfettered market. Want an example? Compare virtually any urban county in Florida with Atlanta, which was effectively killed by twenty years of a lack of planning. I can assure you the people in Atlanta today would love to have our Growth Management System. No. Less planning and state review is not the answer to smart growth. In fact, devolution will make it more difficult to achieve smart growth. I ask you, if a local government decided it wanted to sprawl, should Secretary Seibert say no? Perhaps containing urban sprawl is a significant state issue after all. Also, I don't know where people get this "the Growth Management System is broken" stuff. DCA approves well over 90% of the comprehensive plan amendments it receives. Moreover, it isn't DCA's fault that local governments refuse to follow their plans. Remember, the Department is not involved at all in plan implementation. It does not make sure development orders are consistent with the plan. Perhaps it should. On the contrary, it is the citizens who have to enforce the plan. Unfortunately, they seldom have the resources to do it. When they do sue, this happens in circuit court, which is expensive. It is mined with technicalities like standing and headed by local judges, who often don't know anything about growth management. All this means the market and the local government are really in control of planning in Florida. If a project is inconsistent with the plan, they either just ignore it or change the plan to make it consistent with the development. In the end, I think the failure of local governments to follow the plan is to a large extent what we hate about Florida's dumb growth. I would venture to say, in addition to the vested DRIs and sprawling PUDs approved in the 1960' and 70s, most of the sprawling developments people hate today were not called for in the original plan. They happened when the plan got ignored or amended. Admittedly, things are different in St. Johns County. Your just beginning to feel a new growth spurt. Still, these bad patterns of development die hard. The developers are risk averse, which means they do what made other people money. The challenge is to get them to try to do something different. Build communities instead of developments. Contain urban
sprawl. Thus, we should encourage local governments to contain urban sprawl
and adopt smart growth policies in their plans. They should be required to
adopt tight urban service areas and promote higher density and more mixed
use development inside these lines. When developers seek modifications of
existing projects that would further the goals of smart growth, these should
be easier to get. This would help us fix the old vested subdivisions and DRIs.
Revitalize the suburbs and existing urban areas. Make Sprawlville more livable, and less isolated. Create community gathering places and improve connectivity. Reduce the focus on the automobile and focus instead on our children. Ease local zoning codes in urban revitalization areas. I would call for every local governments in Florida to adopt a smart growth overlay, a mixed use development alternative, and then use state and local money and infrastructure, like schools, roads, and utilities, and other incentives like streamlining to bring these overlays down on the ground. Along the way, why not pass a law that allows anyone to build a garage apartment anywhere with only a building permit? This would go a long way to solving our affordable housing problem. Don't expect to implement this stuff easily in existing urbanized areas. To a large extent the market is still going to greenfields. Smart Growth is not only about just about redevelopment. There are numerous reasons for this. The existing zoning and deed restrictions in place make it hard. Local city and county politics plays a large part, and then there's NIMBYism. Citizens are afraid of density and mixed use and local elected officials often go along with them on this and reject smart growth development. Therefore, we need to educate the citizens and the elected officials on smart growth. Show them what Smart Growth looks like. We also need to empower citizens in the design phase of development. What they really hate is not density, but how it looks. Their fears about mixed use could also be solved with design. You know, design has never been a strong component of Florida's Growth Management program, perhaps it should be. Stop annexations, or at least make them contingent upon smart growth concepts. We should also amend chapter 171, and require that annexations be consistent with both the city and the county's plans and be preceded by adequate intergovernmental coordination. Finally, discourage once and for all the approval of single family, walled-in residential golf course communities unless they are truly mixed use and interconnected. Figure out how to put commercial infill near existing residential areas and connect them with bike, pedestrian and golf cart paths. This can be done to a large extent by keeping the regulatory system that is in place and overlaying it with a smart growth initiative that is optional, but attractive to the developer. Regional issues. If we are going to devolve some state planning review, don't forget the essential need to address regional land use issues at the regional level. Some stuff should only go half way back. I would call for more, not less regional control of regional issues and require real intergovernmental coordination to happen at the regional level. In an effort to encourage the coordination of land, water and transportation planning, I would move the planners from the regional planning councils and put them and DCA employees into the various water management district offices. There require them to coordinate with the regional DOT and DEP offices on a regular basis. Coordination avoids making bad land use decisions. We can also encourage development to be located in the right place by getting the federal, state, and local environmental agencies involved with the development of the local plan. The preidentification of wetlands, mitigation banks, and the development of regional stormwater systems should all be done in the planning phase. Then, if the agencies have to follow the plan when permitting, the developers should have an easier time of getting permits to go to the right place with the right type of development. Transportation Policies. Our developments should be more pedestrian and less automobile oriented. Stop subsiding the construction of new roads for new development. Instead we should spend money on improving existing roads, not building new ones. Where we do have to build new roads, we should require the adjacent local governments to revisit their plans for the surrounding areas to incorporate smart growth concepts. I can assure you St. Johns County would never have tackled smart growth around the I-95 corridor unless the state made the County do so. We should spend some road money to fix Sprawlville. We need to build connections between existing communities and existing commercial centers. Ensure that people can walk and ride bikes to Publix. If this means buying a house and opening a street to the back of the store, do it. Remember, more than 1/4 of all trips are less than 1 mile and could easily be made by bicycle if we just had safe places to ride. This is good for business and the community. An example of this solution is the City of Mountain Brook, Alabama. It built 15 miles of sidewalks connecting residential areas with existing retail stores. After this $850K investment, retail sales increased by 25% in two years. Greenville, South Carolina did the same thing and total employment doubled, commercial occupancy rates increased by 96%, and food sales went up by 80% in the retail areas. People like going to town, especially if they don't need their cars to do it or can avoid getting out on the major arterials, where they have to fight commuter traffic. Help local governments
pull up the roads in urban areas. Why is U.S. 1 in south Florida 4 or 6 lanes
wide? I say, let's focus on people and local businesses. Focus on community
as a value as equal as the level of service for cars. Pedestrian oriented
development and the creation of public spaces should receive just as much
credit as a 6-lane road. Put our kids in your level of service calculations.
I believe we need to allow local government to adopt variable level of services. Make them draw an urban service line based on actual need. Use concurrency to direct growth into the USA, not the other way around. In the exhibit in DC are photographs of the original suburbs. These were just outside Boston and were connected to the city by trolley lines. Why not do this again? The "transit oriented development". Its not a new concept. Make growth management community based. We need to protect existing communities. To do this we have to help them adopt neighborhood plans. The Department should provide technical assistance on the benefits of smart growth and then help local community groups develop a neighborhood plan. Once the community has a plan, it should be adopted into the local government's comprehensive plan. Only then does it have any legal significance and can control development decisions that effect that particular community. Moreover, once a neighborhood plan is adopted, we should require that the citizens agree before it is amended. Protect ecosystems. We need to do a better job of protecting the environment that is in the way of urbanization. Do this by using GIS to locate intact important natural areas that are critical to maintaining the health of ecosystems. Identify them on a map, then protect them by directing growth away from them. Buy them if you have to, but certainly do not subsidize growth near them. On this note, I propose the State of Florida adopt a Conservation Plan and Green Lace Acquisition Map. Identify the lands we need to buy with Forever Florida money and implement the plan with all the regulatory and fiscal tools at our disposal. 1000 Friends gave Mayor John Delaney of Jacksonville an award last year in recognition of his $300 million land acquisition program that does this in his area. We should do this at the state level, because its the fiscally responsible thing to do. Address social issues. We need to protect the quality of life for all persons, not just the rich, retired people from up north. The poor, the elderly, the people left in our urban blighted areas need our help too. On this point, I applaud Governor Bush's Front Porch Initiative and the urban growth bill that passed last year. These should help the disenfranchised deal with the ill effects of sprawl, especially if the local governments are given the technical assistance now to create these planning areas. Let cities regrow, give them money, help them plan and remove obstacles. I honestly believe the future is the downtown, not at the Super Walmart. Protect agriculture.
Help the farmers farm. Use innovative tools like TDRs. Establish strict urban
service areas and then prohibit 298 districts and private utilities from providing
urban services outside the USA. *** To conclude,
urban sprawl is killing our culture. Sprawl has left our cities racially and
economically homogenous and fiscally bankrupt. It has compelled many of us
to drive all over town taking our kids to places they should have been riding
their bikes to in the first place. Sprawl has also compelled others to sit
in traffic for hours a day, wasting valuable time they could have spent with
their families or friends. Fortunately, St. Johns County is facing this new growth spurt as Jacksonville spreads south with essentially a blank slate. A tabula rosa. You have a lot of vacant land owned by large landowner. I think this is a good thing, for its easier to design communities at this scale. However, when approaching these folks, remember my little town of Lake Park. A functioning mixed use community of 1,500 acres. You can also
learn from the mistakes of Orlando and Broward County. Your plan is better
than it was a year ago, and your local government has come a long way to try
and adopt land development regulations. You have some good planners and a
citizenry that seems engaged. These are all necessary elements for smart growth.
I wish you luck. |